Once a legitimate journalist and now a desperate attention-seeker, radio’s Bud Buck is more than willing to purposely misunderstand the details of an assignment if he thinks it leads to a more controversial story. There is almost always less to a breathless Bud Buck expose’ than meets the eye. Here’s the latest atrocity from his growing collection:
Strange Rituals Gain Foothold
In this week leading up to an annual sacred observance for a large section of the populace, I set out to find strange superstitions that represent the worrisome downside of our celebrated freedoms. In short, I was looking for weird religion – alarming rituals happening right under our noses.
The Faithful Form a Line
I didn’t have to look too far to discover what appears to be pagan worship of a mechanical God, the extremely loud and surprisingly portable deity “Shre-Dit”. Just this past Saturday, an impromptu ceremony sprang up in a local parking lot with loyal adherents lining up for the chance to make a sacrificial offering.
Legend has it that Shre-Dit has an insatiable hunger for human secrets.
The God must be fed large amounts of confidential information on a daily basis to maintain his strength.
Sacrificial Offerings
The ritual requires that the secrets be written on paper. During the ceremony the faithful form a line and bring their treasures to the high priest, who is literally above the masses – standing on a wheeled platform to receive offerings from the supplicants. This platform is entirely covered by a metal enclosure, which also hides the deity from direct public view.
The Incarnate Deity
But oh, can you hear him! A whirring, rumbling sound slowly rises as Shre-Dit prepares to accept tributes from his people. The offerings are made in boxes and bags. These sacrifices are flung into the open maw of Shre-Dit and when the secrets are accepted, a sharp, brittle buzz cuts through the air, like the sound of a million locusts leveling an acre of corn in an instant.
Joy is obvious on faces of the supplicants as their classified documents are transformed into sacred confetti.
Why do they do it? I asked some of the faithful to describe their motivation for participating in this bizarre ceremony.
Secret Keepers About to Become Unburdened Through Ritual Sacrifice
“I pray that I can keep my identity intact,” said one adherent who asked that her name not be used.
“I don’t want anyone else to try to become me,” added another who insisted his photographic image be distorted to prevent loss of privacy.
“I’m here to prevent the total theft of everything that makes me who I am, or who I ever hope be,” shouted a third, who tried to wrestle my camera away from me and kicked me in the shins several times.
Apparently Shre-Dit is seen as a protector against complete loss of one’s essential self. If he is even marginally successful at this, that would make Shre-Dit a very potent God indeed.
Re-constituted Sacred Confetti About to Return to Shre-Dit With More Secrets
But there’s more! After the consumption ceremony, the secrets are said to undergo another phase of transformation, eventually being re-incarnated as more pieces of paper that will someday be able to hold new secrets that may eventually be tossed once again into the open metallic jaws of the ravenous Shre-Dit!
I was deeply impressed by the faith of those who brought offerings to the parking lot shrine this past Saturday. They stood in the wind and withstood unseasonably cold temperatures to nourish their mysterious mechanical protector, and to keep their very selves from being lost – forever. But will they reap real rewards for their efforts, or is this just another Strange Superstition?
Time will tell! This is Bud Buck!
Like I say, I think Bud misinterpreted what he saw. But who wants to hear a story about an ordinary shred-a-thon for people’s ordinary financial records? Especially when it’s so easy to think outrageous, surreal things about other people!
Have you participated in, or observed, puzzling rituals?
Today is set aside to honor one of the most beleaguered sectors of our retail economy – the small independent record store. Special events are underway at nearly all the economically pummeled and most certainly doomed establishments. For years it has been an article of faith that the shop you go to when you want to physically peruse an assortment of non-mainstream recordings will soon be extinct.
So think of this as the day the Dodo Bird decided to have an open house. How will you feel about yourself the day after you find out he’s gone for good? And you didn’t even visit when you had such a nice invitation!
Having said that, I must note that there are many small shops that continue to defy these dire predictions and (knock on wood) always will. They enrich our communities and give us hope.
Chief among these sturdy stalwarts is the Homestead Pickin’ Parlor in Richfield, which has catered to an acoustic and roots music crowd since its founding in 1979. The shop is also an academy where some of the finest local musicians of today teach the finest local musicians of tomorrow. The Homestead, under the steady leadership of Marv and Dawn Menzel, is an invaluable resource – a place where performers and their fans find nourishment.
I talked to Marv yesterday and he confirmed that the shop is a survivor.
“There’s no question that small businesses received the brunt of the downturn in the economy. But we’re alive and well. The rent’s paid. The lights are on. And we’re open for business.”
When I pressed him on the dismal economic predictions for those who sell CD’s in a world increasingly in love with the download, Marv acknowledged that the Homestead Pickin’ Parlor is more than a record shop.
“But records are certainly a big part of what we do. Every CD that’s released by an artist, and I’m sure there are exceptions to this, but … it’s a work of art. The artist puts a lot of him or her self into that product, not only the selection of tunes but the art itself, the liner notes … it’s a package that they’re putting together with their fans in mind. And with the advent of the downloading and everything we’ve lost sight of that. Or we are abdicating our right to have such a thing. And that troubles me dearly.”
As a consequence of it’s location on Penn Avenue just south of 66th Street in Richfield, the shop suffered from years of highway construction on the Crosstown and Interstate 35W – a disruption that made it difficult even for not-too-distant customers to get to and from Homestead. Now that the work is done, Marv Menzel is optimistic.
“We’re back to having easy access … and we’re looking ahead to a brighter future.”
The Homestead Pickin’ Parlor will celebrate Record Store Day with live music and hot dogs. There will be specials. And though you can always visit them online, if you don’t find the strength to get up and walk away from that computer, you’ll cheat yourself out of a wonderful and whimsical experience.
Who knows what you might find, just thumbing through the bins?
Share a record store memory.
Sunday Extra:
When I stopped by the Homestead Pickin’ Parlor yesterday, business was brisk.
Live music and free hot dogs added to the festivities. Added advantage: It was cozy inside despite the gale force winds and barely-above-freezing outdoor temps.
Marv admitted this was far from a normal Saturday crowd, and he appeared to enjoy the commotion. Shoppers stood elbow-to-elbow going through raggedy cardboard boxes full of CD’s and LP’s – just the way it should be.
And when I say “raggedy cardboard boxes”, I’m not kidding. At Homestead, every type of display option is on display. From the ‘nice tidy bin’ approach to the ‘box on the floor’ strategy to the ‘stack of discs in the corner’ configuration, the product is out and ready for you to discover it!
Waiting to be Adopted Marv Menzel Behind the Counter
There’s a lot to see at the counter. A retail consultant might say there’s too much here for any one thing to make an impression, but I hope that consultant’s advice would get lost in the clutter. The cash register is more than a place to check out with your purchase – it’s a day’s worth of distraction.
All in all, it was a warm and cheerful place to be on a blustery afternoon in April. If only every day could be like Record Store Day!
Shoppers crowd the registerService Menu Etched in Wood
It’s the season for bird songs – the kind the birdies sing for themselves and the sort of song people sing about the birds. I’m sure a few titles will occur to you after a moments’ worth of thought:
Red Red Robin, Rockin’ Robin, Skylark, Lark in the Morning, Three Little Birds, Free As a Bird, Gonna Find Me a Bluebird, Be Like The Bluebird, When Doves Cry, Dupsha Dove … you get the idea.
A loon was spotted on Lake Calhoun yesterday, according to Bob Collins and Jayne Solinger at the MPR blog News Cut.
I can’t think of many songs about loons, even though loon and Calhoun both fit so comfortably into the classic Moon / June / Croon rhyming scheme popular with songwriters of the golden age of romantic word-rich ditties. It’s no surprise that local songwriter Ann Reed took note a few years ago and gave us this, which, alas, I can only offer you here in the form of lyrics. The song is on her 2009 recording Where The Earth is Round.
I’m riding on my bike
Gliding along
The light is early morning
It’s pretty and half-awake
This city that has
The lakes as its reward
I stop all my inner debating
And waiting a minute, it hovers and fades
Ducks talking, coots check in
Chalking up routes
They’ve been on their migration
Then floating up above
The soloist does her stuff
With carbonation
It’s a melody picked out
To tell how a tickle would sound if given the room
There’s loons on Lake Calhoun
They’ve dropped in to see a show
Stopped to see grebes they know
From a long, late winter
The people lift eyes from the ground
Seeming surprised at the sound
Of grace, delivered
I never expected a miracle
Here I’ll admit: Oh, I rarely — do you?
There’s loons on Lake Calhoun
And they’ve made it from far, far away
Before takin’ it northward, but before they do
There’s loons on Lake Calhoun
I contend that any songwriter can put a classy nightingale or a colorful oriole in their lyric, but you need someone like Ann to write and sing about loons, coots and grebes.
As for other migrations, it looks like at least one Ruby Throated Hummingbird made it into Wisconsin yesterday. And was immediately stripped of its collective bargaining rights. So it goes in the northern climes this year. And still the migratory beat goes on. Lots of things are cropping up – Robins, Earthworms, Whooping Cranes, Barn Swallows, etc.
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, they face an exploding population of feral chickens. This isn’t a migration, it’s a multiplication. But it might cause some cock-a-doodle-doo intolerant people to head north.
And in Canada, it’s Canada Geese, who are not only proliferating, but are threatening (to the not-so-quiet alarm of some scolds) to become our northern neighbor’s official bird!
What have you seen or heard lately that indicates a migration is underway?
My first thought was that here is another unnecessary restriction against an imagined threat – like Oklahoma banning sharia law.
Reading into it a bit, I discovered something with a little more nuance. It wasn’t an outright ban, but rather, an official expression of displeasure. Though in China, what’s the difference? If the declaration on the right means what the New York Times ArtsBeat Blog says it means, the authorities in Beijing formally frown on time travel as a theme in TV shows because such dramas are lacking the required “positive thoughts” area. Also, the plots of such shows “casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.”
So?
It is a stretch for free Americans to imagine living in a place where the entertainment is not built atop “monstrous and weird plots,” and the government dictates the scenario, but perhaps it’s not as bad as we think. After the ArtsBeat article appeared, others chimed in with a slightly different reading – that China has not banned time travel stories outright, but simply cautioned writers and producers against misrepresenting exalted figures of the past when they should be treated with total adoration.
Still.
One blogger pointed out that here in the USA, our exalted figures of the past are all fair game for pretty much anything – witness the effort now underway to make a film out of “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.”
Another possibility that has apparently occurred only to me – China did in fact launch a brutal crackdown on all use of time travel in fiction and in fact, but mysterious people from the distant future swooped in and switched the documents to soften penalties that would otherwise apply to their favorite authors and filmmakers someday – thus avoiding significant pain and discomfort for the very people whose creative anarchy inspired them to become time travelers in the first place.
Well, why not? It could happen. If I were a technologically sophisticated interloper from the future, I’d do what I could to keep Irwin Allen out of jail simply because he gave us Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and this: The Time Tunnel.
Oh, wait. To the people of 1966, I AM a technically sophisticated interloper from the future.
But I still can’t travel through time. Not here, and certainly not anywhere in China. Dang it.
I had to get from my home in New Brighton to an appointment in Brooklyn Center and I didn’t have a car. Fortunately, yesterday was a gorgeous spring day and the prospect of being outside my little glass and steel box for the journey was both energizing and worrisome.
My concern had to do with the natural and man-made obstacles.
When I make this trip by car, it requires less than fifteen minutes of high speed travel on a busy Interstate Highway (694) and State Highway (100) and is as charmless as any metropolitan errand you’re likely to run, with the exception of the expansive view you get of beautiful Fridley as you head west over the hill just past Silver Lake Road. What you might also notice if you could spend some time studying that view is the Mississippi River and several major north-south thoroughfares running on either side of it – University Avenue to the east and I-94 to the west. Another barrier to east-west progress: the massive rail yards that stretch for miles from 694 south to 26th Street in Minneapolis. Looking at all those tracks on the map, I was reminded of a biology textbook close-up of the fibers of a major muscle. Figuring out how to get my little out-of-tune bicycle over all of that was daunting. At the very least I expected a harrowing ride with a close up view of a lot of stuff I’d rather not see.
But guess what? It was fun!
The first revelation was that Google maps has a bicycle icon in the “get directions” window that instantly plotted my trip for two wheels instead of four, giving me a bike-friendly path through the thicket. The eight mile trip I expected to take on busy, unfriendly streets became one that was largely taken on bike paths through some beautiful and interesting scenery. It really didn’t bother me that one-way, the journey took an hour.
Bike path skirting Columbia Golf Course in Minneapolis
Columbia Golf Course offers one of the more vertical rounds of golf you’ll play in the Twin Cities. The bike path around it also has some hills, so expect wind in your hair on the down slope and aching thighs going up. It was sunny and peaceful there yesterday afternoon with all the signs of summer on the way, including sunbathers, dogs and Frisbees.
One railroad crossing out of the way, with about 50 to go
Ah, the smell of creosote in the April sunshine! I love trains, especially when I can cross over or under them. This bridge was right alongside the golf course and reminded me that wood was once the only thing we had to hold up trains at crossings like this. It takes a lot of bracing to make this work!
Downtown through the railing of the bridge that got me safely over University Avenue
The interesting railing on this bridge was a surprising and welcome flourish, especially since it was in such an industrial area. With all the obstacles, I saw that this trip was quickly becoming a bridge tour, and I was happy to not be worrying about dodging the semi-trailers down below.
Glad I didn't have to wait for this train to pass!
The next bridge took me over the larger section of rail yards and was a relic – rusty iron and, on the walkway at least, crumbling concrete. Fortunately the rubble in the cars below came from elsewhere. At least I hope it did. One or two more loads of cement removed from this structure and there’d be nothing left to hold it up. The signs said “Walk Bikes Across Bridge” and I obeyed because I’m a habitual rule follower and I didn’t want to topple over the edge.
The Camden Bridge over a swollen Mississippi also took me over I-94
On the east side of the river I entered North Mississippi Regional Park, which I had never visited before. You can’t see it from the freeway but it stretches from the Camden Bridge up to I-694, and was the most surprising revelation of the trip. There’s a lot to see in here. I’ll be back!
Shingle Creek heads for the river
It doesn’t get as much publicity as Minnehaha, but Shingle Creek runs through northwest Minneapolis and gives the neighborhood its name. It has a waterfall too. You can get close from the bike path, and then follow it down to the Mississippi.
When have you enjoyed the journey more than the destination?
Today, officials at NASA will announce which three American museums will receive the decommissioned space shuttles Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. NASA is also giving away the shuttle prototype Enterprise, which is a test craft that never left the atmosphere so technically it’s a Thin Air Shuttle.
Museum exhibit looking for a place to land
If you run a museum that features things that fly, getting one of these babies would be a real coup. It would also bring a hefty financial obligation, since the cost of preparing a shuttle for display and getting it to your location is a cool 28.8 million dollars.
The people of Dayton, Ohio are excited because their town is in the running. The National Museum of the United States Air Force is at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, ten miles northeast of the city. Dayton has been actively campaigning for the honor and people there will be terribly disappointed if they’re passed over, though who hasn’t been passed over by the shuttle at one time or another?
At the Museum of Flight in Seattle, they’ve already started building a place to house the orbiter they’ve not been given yet, which is either seat-of-the-pants audacious in the best tradition of barnstormers and test pilots, or flat-out foolhardy.
Other candidates include the Johnson Space Center, Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and New York City’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. Some of the contenders are not making a big promotional deal out their entry, possibly because they realize their chances of success are slim and nobody wants to be tagged as a “loser” in the museum world.
I have no such concern about my bid to bring a shuttle to the empty parking slot in my garage. Why, you ask? Building a suitable display for the only retired Space Shuttle on my street would keep me busy, for one thing. And when I was done I’d have a great central attraction to compliment the rest of my personal museum. The other day I went downstairs to retrieve something I can’t even remember the name of and was amazed at the range and scope of the things I have amassed, so I must be building a museum. What else could it be? Though I admit the collection is a bit unfocused.
I’m calling it the Museum of Invisible Objects because it is comprised of things I wanted to have out of my sight as soon as possible, which is what led directly to their installation in the basement galleries.
The largest expense in setting up my museum (after the 28.8 million for shuttle cleaning and delivery) would be the cost of building an escalator so visitors could be whisked from the garage directly into the Hall of Half-Read Books, where both hardback and paperback copies of classic stories and once new groundbreaking fiction are on display. There’s also a non-fiction area, where detailed explorations of things I once thought I wanted to know are carefully arranged in the order I abandoned them.
From there, it’s a short walk to the Obsolete Technology Collection, which includes a walk down Partly Functioning Inkjet Printer Alley, the amazing Inadequate Television Display and an amusing assortment of cassettes, 8 track tapes, LP’s, VHS tapes and laser discs I’m calling the Defunct Format Farm.
We’ll soften the lighting as people transition into the Sentimental Attachment Section where they can view the Enshrined Cute Baby Clothes and walk down the Boulevard of Broken Toys.
Then it’s directly to Ambition Row where they can see the Too-Scary-To-Use Table Saw and the Only-Tried-It-Once Power Washer.
As the tired but happy visitors move towards the exit they’ll pass through the wistful halls of the Period Furniture Farm, where they’ll have a chance to marvel at the things that used to be used to be in the main living area of this house, and in the homes of a number of my relatives.
And because it’s my basement, just before the stairs to the street there will be a whimsical display of bug carcasses under the heading, “Catalog of Things The Spiders Have Eaten”.
Late addition:
That Guy In The Hat sent in this item from his collection as a way to show us that, unlike me, he doesn’t just accumulate junk. Nice. Thanks, TGITH.
This e-mail arrived over the weekend from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, who continues to struggle with the choices facing a young person as he completes yet another year of 10th grade at Wendell Wilkie High School.
Hello Mr. C.,
So last Friday Ms. Murgatroyd called in sick at the last minute and her first hour social studies class, which I’m in, had to go next door to sit with Mr. Eisenstien’s “Introduction to Conceptual Art” class while they called for a sub.
Mr. E. was real good about letting us come in. He said if we had work to do that was class-related we could take care of it quietly in the back of the room while he lectured. That was fine with me because I was kind of hoping I could catch up on some important reading assignments on the backs of my eyelids.
First hour sucks, but you know that.
Anyway, he was up there going on and on about abstract this and subversive that, and the choices people make and how artists have to find a way to be artists and still survive and blah blah blah. Not to criticize him or anything. It’s just that his lecture was making my head feel heavier and heavier – so heavy I was about to put it down on my desk and get to “work” – when suddenly he said he was going to show the class a Woody Woodpecker cartoon.
Mr. E said he had just read an article about this animator who really liked cool art and worked some of it into the assembly line drawing he was doing for a studio. He did it on the sly because high concept art wasn’t supposed to be part of his job and most people are common toads who don’t understand good stuff and wouldn’t cross the street to look at a decent painting with a strong point of view, but they’ll lap up stupid cartoons all day long.
That got me really interested, because I love cartoons. And Woody Woodpecker kicks butt, literally. Mr. E said you can see the abstract stuff in the explosions at 4:40 and 6:33 on this You Tube video.
So that got me to thinking about what I’m going to do with my life. Mr. E said a conceptual artist can be a social critic no matter what line of work he or she goes into – it’s all about the attitude you take and what you consider to be your “mission”.
Personally, my mission is to get a job where I watch cartoons all day long.
Do you think I should be a super-cool conceptual artist, or just an art teacher like Mr. E?
Your pal,
Bubby
I told Bubby to be clear about the real job of teaching. Even though Mr. E. showed his class a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, that doesn’t mean he “watches cartoons all day long”. Far from it. And in any case it’s a bad idea to disparage someone’s line of work. Being “just an art teacher” is not a step down from being “a super-cool conceptual artist”. But I am glad that something happened at school to get him thinking – and excited about the future.
I received a rambling, late night message from a friend who lives far outside the city. Obviously he has a lot of time on his hands, even though he doesn’t have hands.
This has been translated from the original Ursus Textish.
Bart - The Bear Who Found a Cell Phone
Hey, Bart here.
Pretty warm here today. I noticed the people are coming out of hibernation.
Doesn’t take very long before they head into the woods to start chopping down trees, pitching tents, starting campfires, and checking their e-mail. Good thing we’ve got solid coverage out here. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at YouTube. Pretty cool, but not enough bears (yet).
Anyway, it’s good to have some real company. I like to sit in the dark and listen to the voices. You can kinda figure out what’s going on if you pay attention. So tell your friends this is a great time to go camping. The whole forest is coming to life, but the berries aren’t out yet, so when you come, bring lunchmeat and chips in paper bags. Be sure to leave the bags sitting on the ground outside your tent.
At the edge of the clearing would be even better.
Heard some campers talking last night about something big getting shut down or turned off because some people got backed into a corner and couldn’t find a way out, even though they knew it would be very, very bad to keep on being stubborn. Then later, the way they were talking made it sound like the problem got solved (until next time). All it took was a little pressure and some letting go. We bears know all about that, believe me.
Every so often a bear gets stuck in a tree in some really busy neighborhood. You start walking, you listen to the voices in your own head telling you what to do and suddenly things start looking a little weird. You know you took a wrong turn back a ways and you don’t want to be there and you start to wonder if you can walk out the way you came in. But then somebody sees you and starts shouting this and that about a bear and you get scared and confused and you don’t know where to go, and then there’s this tree, so you climb it. And then what? You can’t just come down and saunter off. It’s a big mess and there are so many ways it can end wrong.
I’m not saying this is personal experience, though it might have happened to me once near Alexandria. It’s possible that a tranquilizer gun was used, and maybe a trampoline was put under the tree to break my fall. My memory’s a bit foggy, but I do recall this – pain in leg, feeling dizzy, one big bounce and almost another, then flashing lights, the police van and a sore neck. Lesson? It’s always good to have spotters when you’re playing with a trampoline.
Word in the woods is that another one of my kind got into that exact situation in Virginia Beach, VA just yesterday. You don’t have to watch the whole thing, but catch the first few seconds because you’ll get to see something you usually don’t – a bear in a harness!
Looks kinda like fun to me. And scary. Anyway, I guess the lesson is that there are always ways to get out of an awkward spot if you’re willing to let go of a little bit of your dignity.
It appears the government shutdown faceoff has come to its final day, as expected.
In a meeting last night the Republican leader of the House and the Democratic leader of the Senate could not even agree on whether they had agreed about anything. Senator Reid thought they at least had a deal on the numbers, but Representative Boehner was pretty certain they didn’t.
This does not bode well.
In preparation for the shutdown, government workers began getting furlough notices yesterday. Some received letters telling them that they are too important to the nation to be allowed to stay home and they will be expected to report for duty without pay, starting next week. There’s a letter worthy of committing to your personal archives – file it next to the one you got from that person you were dating in college when they said they no longer loved you, but could you still take care of their cat over Easter break?
It is unthinkable that those serving in war zones and their families back home will be asked to accept this arrangement given the sacrifices they have already made, so expect at least one more vote today to take care of them. For the rest of the essential expendables, get ready for a simultaneous embrace / stiff-arm. We can only hope those workers responsible for keeping the space station astronauts alive will do their jobs and not complain. Ditto for whoever puts food in the Interior Department fish tank. And please, don’t make too big a show of your devotion to duty – it interferes with the narrative that says public workers are overcompensated wastrels.
Speaking of narratives, the storytelling goes into high gear today just in time for our weekend entertainment. By Monday morning we should have a pretty good idea whose version of the tale has more box office appeal – the Republican melodrama about irresponsible Democrats blowing the family paycheck down at the local tavern to buy rounds for their lazy cronies while the homestead is being repossessed, or the Democratic thriller about Republican and Tea Party anarchists hijacking a government train packed with poor orphans headed to camp and de-railing it into the mouth of an exploding volcano.
These are two classic scenarios that come pre-loaded with heartless villains, helpless victims and possibly some last minute heroics. The problem? Though we’ve seen each storyline a hundred times, there’s a chance half the country will go to see one movie and half will enjoy the other.
Then what? Popcorn, anyone? Or is dad still saying “no concessions”?
Today is Billie Holiday’s birthday. She started her famously untidy life in Baltimore on April 7th, 1915 as Eleanora Fagan. It didn’t last long. She died at 44.
It’s hard to imagine how anyone could begin with more obstacles to face – poverty and racism for starters with physical abuse and drug addiction down the road. With no status and no advantages she managed to create a lasting body of work and fundamentally changed the way people sing songs. Billie Holiday performed sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall and was also arrested on drug charges in a hospital bed during her final illness. Saying she had highs and lows doesn’t even begin to describe it.
What strikes me is how casually the world would have overlooked her, as countless millions born into similar circumstances have been. It is completely whimsical that we got to hear her voice at all – it could so easily have gone another way. Jazz impresario John Hammond went to a club to listen to a different singer but heard Billie Holiday instead. She caught a break and made a lasting impression, and as a result people will be listening to Billie Holiday long after the rest of us are forgotten.
Here she is with her voice weirdly out of synch to the video – so close your eyes if you have to. I’m guessing this is what the experts mean when they say she sang like a horn player, trading solos with the guys in the band.
So I guess we learn from this that talent can be found an appreciated in spite of adversity, though in the case of Billie Holiday you can’t say adversity was overcome. Her amazing emergence makes me think of a talk I heard a few weeks ago that had to do with the way diamonds are formed and brought to the surface. They are incredibly hard to find even if you know the conditions are right for diamonds to exist. There could be a diamond strike under your house, or under the parking lot across the street, but not necessarily both.
Ever stumble across an amazing, totally unexpected find?
Trail Baboon 